I found this perusing through visualization blogs. This particular method is used generically to measure webpage download performance, but it could measure any number of processes. The 'Waterfall Chart' is a cool way to visualize parallelization bottlenecks, and simple too. I don't know why Excel sorts the chart backwards, but..you'll find it under custom charts as 'Floating Bars'.
Obviously, you can tag each process multidimensionally depending how you want to go through attribute tagging. The metrics for this example is simple. However you could also consider a multistage process as a contiguous stackbar.
In this example, Process 9 is the bottleneck as no other process can start before it finishes, and the visual clue is very easy to see with this sort by start time.
To create this data would be simple, given some conversion into UNIX time, or seconds since x, indexed to an arbitary start date of the first process.
Thanks for sharing this new process. I've been using the other process of attribute tagging but its not so perfect as the you are saying. Anyway thanks for sharing this smart idea. I'll be subscribing on your site as soon as I can. More Power to your site.
Posted by: custom waterfall | December 19, 2010 at 07:36 PM